


Pick Your Poison

by newisalwaysbetter



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alcohol Use/Alcohol Abuse, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt!Lucy, Hurt/Comfort, Soft Ending, Whump, forced medicine tw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-15 00:08:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20609639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newisalwaysbetter/pseuds/newisalwaysbetter
Summary: She’d awoken from two weeks of bed rest with only one person in mind, and if she doesn’t see Garcia Flynn with her own two eyes, she won’t believe they really got out of there alive.--------------------Written after a request for "whumpee remembers the Whumper torturing them and decides to drown their sorrows in alcohol" + garcy.





	Pick Your Poison

**Author's Note:**

> Set post-S2, with warnings for alcohol, mentions of injury and blood, light implications of torture, death mentions, guns and gun threats, and forced medicine.

_I was on my third drink when you walked in._

The bunker halls are cold and full of dust, and Flynn’s clipped description of their Sao Paolo encounter sounds far better than tonight.

With the difficulty her broken leg is giving her, every step across the hard concrete draws a grunt of pain. Lucy is still weak from her ordeal, and Flynn has hidden himself so far deep in the bunker’s labyrinthine stomach, that soon enough she’s too weak to support herself on both crutches. After a moment’s consideration, she abandons one of them with a clatter in the hall, and resorts to stubbornly sidling, pressed up against the wall and dragging her splinted leg behind her. Her probable concussion makes it difficult to listen for the muffled sobs that guide her, but Lucy is resolute. She’d awoken from two weeks of bed rest with only one person in mind, and if she doesn’t see Garcia Flynn with her own two eyes, she won’t believe they really got out of there alive.

She’d taken the worst of the beating; Rittenhouse must have assumed she would break under interrogation faster than Flynn would. Lucy is grimly proud of her unexpected resistance, even if her jaw is beginning to ache from holding back the persistent echo of pain. She hadn’t said a word.

Neither had Flynn, though perhaps for different reasons. Lucy doesn’t remember much from after her interrogation, but she’d been hazily awake in the car ride out, and she remembers Flynn sitting across from her, hands fisted in his hair, rocking slowly back and forth in terrible silence.

He doesn’t look much better, tonight.

This deep in the belly of the bunker, there are no windows, and the long-outdated lighting flickers, threatening to die. As Lucy drags herself closer, she catches glimpses of the body curled at the end of the hall.

“Flynn,” she whispers through her teeth, but the sound is too weak, and the man himself shows no signs of moving. “_Flynn._”

Empty bottles litter the filthy floor all around him, and the light catches off the stainless steel flask still lying in his limp left hand. With his head drooping and his hair covering his face, Flynn looks like a puppet with his strings cut; the wall at his back is the only thing keeping him up.

“Garcia–” She means to say his full name, but an unexpected jolt of agony cuts off the surname in her throat. Lucy tries to bite off the cry that rips its way up out of her, but it comes out soft and strangled instead.

_That_ gets his attention, sort of. Flynn sniffles, and his dark head jerks a fraction.

“Please.” Lucy tries to lift her voice a degree, and at the same time to not sound like she’s begging.

This time, she knows he hears her, because Flynn’s shoulders shudder, and his head flies upward, and he breathes something that is definitely _Lucy_ in the thickest accent she’s ever heard.

His eyes flicker half-open, and it takes a moment for them to focus on her in the darkness. Lucy notices when it happens, because all the air escapes him in a rush, and he starts scrambling upwards, the metal flask clattering against the floor.

You don’t have to do that,” Lucy mutters, but he hardly seems to hear. She’s never seen Flynn move so ungracefully; his usual fluid lethality is gone, replaced by clumsy fumbling against the wall, and it seems dangerous, to have that much muscle out of rein. She drags herself forward a few inches.

Lucy wants to reach out, but between clinging to the wall with one hand and clutching her remaining crutch with the other, she doesn’t know how she’s going to manage it. Until, that is, Flynn crosses the distance in one lengthy stride and catches her safely under the arms.

She’s more than a little startled; despite his remarkably poor sense of personal space, Flynn has only ever touched her when he felt it necessary. And Lucy realizes, a moment too late, that her legs are falling out from under her.

Flynn drags her up against his chest. Even with liquor heavy on his labored breath, he’d realized she was collapsing before she had.

Furthermore, when he sways on his feet, Lucy hisses and fists her hands in his shirt. Holding her seems to be the only thing keeping him up.

So Lucy begins to inch her hands higher, until she’s hanging safely around Flynn’s neck. From there, it’s only a few inches’ surrender to fall against him completely, nestling into that warm chest. “You’re all right.”

It’s not strictly true; he smells of sweat and tears, and seeing as he’s seen her hurt before, Lucy’s almost certain that she’s interrupted some private moment of extraordinary crisis. The man has scars she doesn’t know about, even now.

Still, it feels right as a reassurance, a question, or a prayer. “You’re all right, Flynn. We got out. We’re…” Her hands tighten on him. “We’re healing.”

There’s a long moment in which they only breathe against each other. Flynn is warm and unfaltering, she notices, but stiff as a board.

Finally, he croaks, in a gravelly voice slurred with crying, “You weren’t, before.”

There’s something there, deep and dark as a poisoned well, that she can’t quite read. Lucy lets her head fall back to look up at him. His stormy eyes are lined with red.

“And what is _that_ supposed to mean?”

Lucy knows she should wait. He might be swaying out of comfort, but rather, she suspects the alcohol is messing with his internal gyroscope. Flynn is liable to tell her anything. But then, Lucy knows in her heart that that’s not exactly caused by the liquor.

“Something happened,” she guesses, into his silence. “While we were captured.”

It’s half a question. Flynn’s heavy head bobs limply.

“It’s okay.” Lucy drags herself up a millimeter to press their foreheads together. “It’s all right. You don’t have to tell me right now.”

“They wanted me to hurt you,” he rasps suddenly. “And I did.”

“No.” Lucy feels sick. “That, I would remember–”

“Would you?” Flynn’s voice hisses like an open flame. “The way they took you apart, Lucy, how would you _know_ who was hurting you? Who was helping you? How would you know…?”

He trails off, choking.

Lucy pulls back a fraction, shaking her head.

Flynn won’t look at her. He scrubs a hand over his eyes. Lucy doesn’t recognize the words he’s muttering in Croatian to himself, but they sound like self-flagellation.

“Don’t,” she whispers, and nuzzles against his face. “Don’t talk to yourself like that. We’ve talked about this.”

Flynn gives an awkward little shoulder wiggle that she recognizes as suppressing a sob. His hands slide into his pockets. “You have to understand. I could never apologize to you enough–”

In her frustration, the tension slips into her voice. “You have to give me a chance to forgive you for–for whatever it is!”

“_There were no painkillers,_” he spits back, raw as a live wire.

For a moment, it’s all too much. Flynn’s red eyes are enormous and deep, and despair rips across his face like lightning. Emotion shakes his frame.

When he speaks again, his deep voice is wet. “You remember what they did to you.”

Lucy’s brows furrow. “I remember enough…”

“Oh, you remember what they did to you, before.” His laugh is like a death rattle. “But afterwards, do you remember when Emma put her gun against your haed, and ordered me to _fix you?_ Do you remember how the medical alcohol must have burned, Lucy?” His trembling hands slide higher up. “Do you remember when I closed up your raw back? Or, or when I set your broken leg? Or when I put this arm back in its socket? You screamed, do you remember that?” Lord, the man looks absolutely heartbroken. One would almost think he _wants_ to be hated. “You have to remember that _I hurt you,_ Lucy–you have to.”

A gasp escapes her, for a moment. But Flynn is still gazing down at her in agonized supplication, and Lucy doesn’t want to be afraid of these strong hands that cradled her so gently. So she takes a deep breath, and gathers a grounding fistful of the back of his shirt collar, and says, “All right.”

“Lucy.” His arms tighten around her. “I won’t let you do this. You–” A low whine. “You deserve better than me.”

“_I_ will decide what I deserve, Garcia Flynn.” Lucy rests her elbows on his shoulders, releasing his neck, and Flynn instinctively shifts to hold her weight completely. “I would have been in pain either way.”

“I made it worse,” he insists.

“You kept me alive.”

“I caused you pain–”

“_Who hasn’t?_”

That stops him short, which allows Lucy to catch his face in her hands. “You tried your best. You didn’t want to hurt me. Right?”

“Of course, Lucy, but–”

“What you did was not unforgivable. _You_ arenot unforgivable.” She lets out the breath she’s been holding. “_I forgive you._”

For a moment, his face twists.

Finally, and as if in slow motion, Flynn’s heavy head sinks low, until his eyes rest against her shoulder. Lucy can feel the tears come, slow and wet. They sway slowly together, half out of comfort, and half to stay upright.

They’re both disjointed, broken by recent days. But still, they find their ways together.


End file.
